al; the defence not only fastens the guilt upon this
unhappy woman, by supplying the missing links, but proves
premeditation, by the person of an accomplice. Four months have been
spent in hunting some fact that would tend to exculpate the accused,
but each circumstance dragged to light serves only to swell the dismal
chorus, 'Woe to the guilty'. To-day she sits in the ashes of
desolation, condemned by the unanimous evidence of every known fact
connecred with this awful tragedy. To oppose this black and frightful
host of proofs, what does she offer us? Simply her bare, solemnly
reiterated denial of guilt. We hold our breath, hoping against hope
that she will give some explanation, some solution, that our pitying
hearts are waiting so eagerly to hear; but dumb as the Sphinx, she
awaits her doom. You will weigh that bare denial in the scale with the
evidence, and in this momentous duty recollect the cautious admonition
that has been furnished to guide you: 'Cosceding that asseverations of
innocence are always deserving of consideration by the executive, what
is there to invest them with a conclusive efficacy, in opposition to a
chain of presumptive evidence, the force and weight of which falls
short only of mathematical demonstration?' The astute and eloquent
counsel for defence, has cited some well-known cases, to shake your
faith in the value of merely presumptive proof.

"I offer for your consideration, an instance of the fallibility of
merely bare, unsupported denial of guilt on the part of the accused. A
priest at Lauterbach was suspected, arrested and tried for the murder
of a woman, under very aggravated circumstances. He was subjected to
eighty examinations; and each time solemnly denied the crime. Even when
confronted at midnight with the skull of the victim murdered eight
years before, he vehemently protested his innocence; called on the
skull to declare him not the assassin, and appealed to the Holy Trinity
to proclaim his innocence. Finally he confessed his crime; testified
that while cutting the throat of his victim, he had exhorted her to
repentance, had given her absolution, and that having concealed the
corpse, he had said masses for her soul.

"The forlorn and hopeless condition of the prisoner at this bar,
appeals pathetically to that compassion which we are taught to believe
coexists with justice, even in the omnipotent God we worship; yet in
the face of incontrovertible facts elicited from reliable wi